How a Texas College Banned a Drag Show and Burned the First Amendment

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An LGBTQ student group at West Texas A&M University (WTAMU), Spectrum, began organizing a drag show last fall. With the university’s approval, the students advertised and sold tickets to the event—a fundraiser for The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention nonprofit—and reserved the campus’ Jack B. Kelley Student Center for March 31.

On March 20, three days after the venue approved Spectrum’s music selection, University President Walter Wendler unilaterally banned the show from campus. Wendler provided his rationale in a school-wide email with the subject line “A Harmless Drag Show? No Such Thing.”

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In the email later published to Wendler’s blog, the president of the public university attempted to justify banning drag from WTAMU on the pretense that the artform is necessarily “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny,” and akin to blackface. (In doing so, he cited a 2015 Slate essay by drag queen Miz Cracker, who actually debunks comparisons of drag and blackface, making the obvious clarification that individual cases of misogyny among drag performers do “not make the entire art form inherently misogynistic.”)

In a March 21 statement posted to Instagram, the student organization responded, writing, “Drag is not a mockery—it is a celebration. Drag is a celebration of many things; queerness, gender, acceptance, love, and especially femininity. To call it mockery or misogynistic is to miss the entire point of what drag is, and what drag means.”

Wendler’s decision comes amid a nationwide right-wing moral panic surrounding drag. In a statement shared with The Daily Beast, Ash Hall of the ACLU of Texas said that Wendler’s decision represents “part of a wave of political attacks against the LGBTQ+ community,” which “stoke misinformation, threats, and violence.”

Noting that, in 2012, a charity drag show was held in the same venue that Spectrum’s was set to take place, Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) also described the development as an apparent “manifestation of… the overall national furor over drag shows.”

Texas’ state legislature is considering a number of bills that would criminalize drag performances, which right-wing proponents claim “are sexually explicit and expose children to issues… that should be reserved to adults.” Critics of anti-drag proposals have pointed out, however, that drag shows (like plays, movies, and other forms of entertainment) are not inherently sexual—Spectrum’s, for instance, was planned to be PG-13, devoid of both lewd conduct and explicit music, and open only to adults and minors accompanied by a parent.

Wendler’s decision to impose bounds on student expression based on his personal (and explicitly religiously-motivated) perspective on the artform seems to run roughshod over the First Amendment, to which he should be beholden as the president of a public university. In the statement shared with The Daily Beast on behalf of the Texas ACLU, Hall held that WTAMU students are entitled to “exercise their First Amendment right to express themselves artistically through drag.” The statement continues, “We call on President Wendler to reverse his unconstitutional decision, and simply let students enjoy an art form as old as Shakespeare.”

But the issue of constitutionality is unlikely to phase Wendler, as it certainly has failed to give him pause so far. In his March 20 email, he seemingly acknowledged that he could be acting in defiance of the First Amendment, expressing an arrogant commitment to ban drag “even when the law of the land appears to require” otherwise.

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The move is consistent with an apparent history of Wendler’s social conservatism interfering with his responsibilities as a university official. In 2004, as chancellor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Wendler controversially suggested that extending certain medical benefits to university employees in gay and lesbian relationships would “encourag[e] sinful behavior,” according to an article published in The Southern Illinoisan.

Then, in a 2019 university-wide email to the WTAMU community, Weldner held that sex is safest when it occurs—among other criteria—“between a husband and wife.” The statement elicited criticism for “foster[ing] discrimination and alienat[ing]” LGBTQ students, and Wendler later apologized.

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A WTAMU spokesperson was unable to comment on the drag show’s cancellation “due to pending litigation.” Indeed, on March 24, Spectrum’s president and vice president, represented by FIRE, sued Wendler as well as two other WTAMU officials. They hope to “halt Wendler’s unlawful censorship” and “obtain damages for violating the students’ clearly established First Amendment rights.”

As Steinbaugh, one of the lawyers representing the students, told The Daily Beast, everyone is entitled to exercise First Amendment rights, whether “you are a right-wing student organization that wants to invite some speaker that people are going to protest…or if you are a LGBTQ group that wants to put on a drag show.” And yet, he said, in Wendler, “you have the president of a public university saying, ‘I know the law appears to require me to allow you to do this, but I am shuttering the door to this student group because I find their speech loathsome.’ And that’s just not how the First Amendment works.”

Since Wendler’s decision to cancel the show, WTAMU students have held numerous protests on campus. An online petition to save the drag show garnered over 13,000 signatures and, with help from online attention and crowdfunding, Spectrum was able to host their show at an off-campus location on March 31.

Amid the controversy, many on the right have rushed to Wendler’s defense. Local GOP Chairman Dan Rogers, for example, circulated a message in support of the president, insinuating that Spectrum “is trying to disrupt society.” Rogers continued, “I think it’s the very definition of evil because they’re trying to make their lifestyle something that everybody should accept.” The West Texas A&M chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas also published a statement commending Wendler’s censorship, on the grounds that drag shows represent “a vehicle for the destruction of our society’s once-stable constructions of gender, both male and female.”

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Such sentiments, holding restrictive gender norms in higher esteem than constitutional restrictions against censorship, reveal the authoritarian impulse driving efforts to ban drag. While supporters of drag bans prate on about the importance of the Constitution and freedom in other contexts, it's clear that they are referring to “freedom” to act within narrowly imposed—and, here, blatantly unconstitutional—confines.

In hosting their show off campus, WTAMU students resiliently worked around administrative suppression—but still, all is not well at WTAMU. As the FIRE lawsuit notes, Wendler’s actions have made the student organization “apprehensive about hosting” future events on campus, such as their annual National Coming Out day event, “for fear of similar treatment by President Wendler or his administration.”

Until Wendler’s actions are rectified, it will remain disturbingly unclear whether student expression at West Texas A&M is dictated by the guarantees of the First Amendment, or the lawless caprices of its president.

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